Requirements' elicitation needs for eLearning Systems

Abstract

Electronic Learning, or more popularly known as eLearning, is generally defined to be the use of technology in the delivery of education or training. eLearning Systems (eLS) are now integral parts of educational organizations. eLS are diverse in nature and size. They are nowadays integral parts also of some commercial or governmental organizations as they are cost-effective means of delivering training to employees. With the diversity of people using eLS, there is a need for continuous improvement, and software development teams need to better understand the stakeholders' requirements for faster delivery, enhancement, or personalization of eLS. Requirements elicitation is an activity within requirements engineering that is concerned with discovering needs of stakeholders, either for software development from scratch or evolution. In this paper we identify the special properties of eLS that characterize them from other software systems to help with better understanding of such domain, discuss the special requirements elicitation challenges that the special properties introduce, and introduce the main current requirements elicitation approaches used for the domain. Our research so far revealed that there are very limited approaches that are especially tailored for such domain. Hence we propose in this paper the use of crowdsourcing, which means exploiting the power of the crowd in performing tasks, as a new approach for eliciting requirements of eLS, the paper presents a framework of the necessary elements needed under the umbrella of this new approach to fill in the identified current research gap in the domain.